Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword across the humanities; the term usually implies that scholars make use of the tools of another discipline while remaining within the boundaries of their own. The French philosopher Jacques Rancière points to the impossibility of this project, describing his work as “a-disciplinary” or “in-disciplinary.” This conference seeks to reflect on the current state of work within the humanities by asking if the traditional ways of organizing disciplines are sufficient for the future of academia.

Though the list is not meant to be exhaustive, we invite talks/papers that deal with the following topics:

• Papers that set out to question and critique the limits of disciplines, thus producing new ways of reading and engaging with texts

• Talks that explore the status of one’s own interdisciplinary work within a more traditionally organized department

One theorist who has addressed these questions is Rancière. In his article, “Thinking Between Disciplines: An Aesthetics of Knowledge,” Rancière writes: “A discipline is always much more than an ensemble of procedures which permit the thought of a given territory of objects. It is first the constitution of this territory itself, and therefore the establishment of a certain distribution of the thinkable.” Rancière maintains that disciplines are structures that dictate how knowledge will appear from the beginning of the investigation. In other words, the objects of knowledge taken up by a discipline are contoured and pre-determined by the disciplines themselves. Rancière speaks of disciplines as “war machines” in the sense that they are always engaged in an antagonistic and exclusionary process that makes interdisciplinarity an a priori impossibility. His works point to the fact that these older models of disciplines are insufficient and limit possibilities for thinking by “distributing the thinkable,” “regulating dissensus,” and “distributing positions.” Among others, we also are looking for papers that outline the ways Rancière’s thought has been taken up in other disciplines as well as readings that engage specifically with Rancière’s philosophy.

Although we use Rancière as a model for thinking about the limits of disciplines and the adisciplinarity, we are also interested in the papers that do not address Rancière’s work directly but engage with the larger topics of the conference as well.

Please send an abstract of at least 250 words detailing your proposal for a twenty-minute presentation along with your C.V. to adisciplinarity@gmail.com by February 26.

cfp categories:

american

bibliography_and_history_of_the_book

classical_studies

cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches

ecocriticism_and_environmental_studies

film_and_television

gender_studies_and_sexuality

general_announcements

graduate_conferences

interdisciplinary

modernist studies

popular_culture

postcolonial

religion

rhetoric_and_composition

science_and_culture

theory

twentieth_century_and_beyond

By web submission at 02/04/2014 - 17:01

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